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Mexican Relish
1 qt. ripe tomatoes, drained and chopped. 4 C chopped celery 4 C chopped onions 1 C mustard seed 5 green peppers 5 red peppers ½ C salt 4 C sugar 6 C vinegar Emma G Smith.
Mix all together but do not cook. Put in cans but do not seal air tight.
Mrs. Allie T. Nicholas.
Gladys Suydam
This is a raw, unprocessed relish that the original directs into cans for storage — a method no longer considered sound. The notes below explain where it fails and what the measurements mean.
- No heat, no seal, no shelf lifeNothing here is cooked and the jars are deliberately left loose, so there is no vacuum and no thermal kill step. An unsealed, unrefrigerated jar of chopped tomato, celery and onion will grow mould and spoilage yeasts within days to weeks, and the surface film that forms consumes acid, raising the pH of what is underneath. A current tested relish recipe with a boiling-water process should be used instead.
- The salt is not accounted forOne and a half cups is roughly 400 g of salt against three to four quarts of chopped vegetables. Recipes of this type often salted the vegetables overnight and poured off the brine before adding sugar and vinegar; this version never tells you to drain it, so as written the finished relish is brine, not seasoning.
- Vinegar strength was not standardisedHousehold vinegar of this period was not sold to a guaranteed strength and its acidity cannot be assumed. Modern preserving assumes 5 percent, and safe pickling depends on knowing that number — another reason the acid balance here cannot be verified.
- "Ripe tomatoes, drained"A quart of chopped ripe tomatoes is roughly 2 lb, more if the quart is measured after draining. Ripe tomatoes are borderline in acidity, which is why current tomato preserving instructions call for added lemon juice or citric acid; older books assumed tomatoes were reliably sour.
- Mustard seedA full cup of whole mustard seed is a large quantity; mustard has mild antimicrobial action, so it may have been doing some preservative as well as flavour work. Yellow seed is the milder sort and the likely intent; brown seed would make the relish sharply hot.
- The three namesEmma G. Smith, Mrs. Allie T. Nicholas and Gladys Suydam are all credited, which may mean the same recipe reached the committee from more than one contributor. Whatever the reason, the names are attributions, not an instruction.
Uncooked chopped relishes of tomato, celery, onion and sweet pepper were common in American community cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1930s, appearing under a shifting set of names — chow-chow, pepper hash, and, in some books, "Mexican" or "Spanish" relish. The label had little to do with Mexican cooking; the name most likely signalled colour and a suggestion of heat rather than any actual origin, though this is inference rather than documented fact. Community cookbooks of this kind were fundraising projects assembled from members' handwritten cards, which may explain the telegraphic instructions. The direction not to seal airtight reflects an older practice — heavily salted, vinegared vegetables were expected to keep in a cool cellar with a loose cover, an approach that predates modern home canning guidance and was superseded as state extension services published tested processing times in the early twentieth century.